Locals bring aid, gospel to poverty-stricken Nicaragua

Tomorrow morning, Navarre locals Doug, Deborah and Paul Gilmore will wake with the sun in the heart of rural Nicaragua to begin a long day of feeding, building and preaching to the impoverished locals.

The Gilmore family is on their eighth mission trip to Nicaragua as part of Light and Life Missions program, a group that travels around the world to countries in need providing aid while preaching Christianity.

“We went to the feeding centers, and when we saw the poverty it is nothing like being in the city,” Doug Gilmore said. “In the city, they say the annual income is something like $700 a year. Places where we are working, it can be nothing. They live from meal to meal, not day to day or paycheck to paycheck. Most of them don’t have a paycheck. There’s no work.”

The family walks dirt roads past open-air shacks and lean-tos. Vendors sell mystery meats and fresh baked breads, while children hoist dead iguanas up by the tail to tempt possible buyers.

The heads of the iguanas, which outstretch the 8- and 9-year-old businessmen, brush the ground by their bare toes.

Read the full article in the July 7 issue of Navarre Press. Click HERE to subscribe to your community newspaper.